


Difficulties

by theartfulroger



Category: Gone Series - Michael Grant
Genre: F/M, Set during the first book, Underage Drinking, commission for tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:47:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22026571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theartfulroger/pseuds/theartfulroger
Summary: Orc and Astrid cross paths.
Relationships: Astrid Ellison/Charles "Orc" Merriman
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Difficulties

**Author's Note:**

> commission for @gone-series-orchid on tumblr! <3 i would be happy to do more so if anyone reading this is interested in commissions, please let me know @stanleyuris on tumblr.

Orc sang in church choir before his voice got deep, and what he remembered most was that all the boys in the choir wore white. He didn’t own anything else white beyond that pressed shirt from choir. White clothing was easily stained by beer or blood or canned baked beans. He kept his choir shirt folded in the bottom of a drawer. Howard asked him, once, two or three in the morning after a beer or two, what it was like to lose your body to stone. The conversation turned to whether he wanted his old body back. Orc had laughed it off—no, not really, even before all of the difficulties, he wanted the kind of life where he could own white clothing. And it would be difficult to have that kind of life now, at a table with a plastic cloth looted from a ninety-nine cent store, a pack of Four Lokos open in front of him. It was also starting to become difficult to discern just when he was drunk. Howard had joked that it was some kind of side effect of his burdgeoning stone face, that after three Four Lokos he felt little other than a small headache. It all further confirmed his theory that this was some kind of divine punishment, that he could inflict more pain upon himself and feel less of it. 

A knock at the door. Orc took a contemplative swig of Four Loko. It was a lulling time of night between ten and midnight, when Orc often considered when he would have gone to bed before the FAYZ and then came to the eventual realization that there was no one around to stop him. Howard would often stay during the single-digit hours of the morning, nap in the middle of the day or the evening and down a Monster energy drink at an odd hour of the night. But there as a part of Orc that, despite the freedom of it all, looked at living like this and wondered if there had perhaps been some kind of reasoning behind ten-o’clock bedtimes and laminated food pyramid placemats at the table. Not that he had ever had that kind of life. When the knock came he was acutely aware of the fact that in the silence of the nap Howard was engrossed in, it felt like he was alone. Some people—friends’ older brothers, lethargic skateboarders on the outskirts of the community college, achieved that mythos of really living alone, but Orc had somehow never really thought about what it would be like to live without the constant I’m sorry I didn’t get Ragu and eggs, I’ll do better from his mother and the growl of his father slurping down a beer and the whimpers that followed. A life like that had a way of seeming constant. 

He ambled down to the door. Sometimes when he grabbed doorknobs or opened windows the force of his own hands surprised him, in a sensation that could only be described like a gust of wind blowing him backwards. But regardless, before he could think about it too hard he was focused on the doorway was Astrid Ellison. She stood a foot or so shorter than he was, though her willowy hair was wound up into a ponytail on top of her head that added a bit of height. She had the suggestion of a hickey at the curve of her ear: Sam, no doubt. And she wore white. A white t-shirt, a black sports bra, what might have once been yoga leggings. 

“Hi,” Astrid began. Orc searched her tone for apprehension or judgment. She had her hand at her hip and her shoulders were bunched up, but that was fairly ordinary for Astrid. There was a kind of soft defeatedness in her face. People other than him had started to look like ragdolls to Orc since the FAYZ. “I’m sorry to barge in on you like this. Is Howard home?”

“He’s asleep,” Orc said, and there was a twinge in a part of him that wanted astrid to say she was looking for him. Astrid was the sort of person it was hard to detect true kindness in, because she seemed to have everyone’s convenience at heart. A polite gesture from Astrid seemed like a given, so there was little he could do to parse what real caring from her would look like. “I can wake him up if you want.” He glanced over his shoulder back into the dark of their ramshackle house. 

“That’s okay,” she said, almost brushing past him to step into the doorway. “I guess it would be better to talk to you anyways. I would have felt weird talking to Howard about you.”

“About me?” 

“Can I come in?”

“Okay,” Orc said, and found himself fretting over whether it was better to say sure, okay, or yes. This was another side effect of the FAYZ. Before it all, when he had been Charles Merriman, he hadn’t had the energy to care about something like that. But now everyone he had knocked around was at his level, wanting to make conversation. He could no longer be the scariest thing in a room. He watched Astrid guide the door shut. His mouth tasted acidically like alcohol. He knew she was about to say something; Astrid had a way of gesturing when in abstract swoops when she was about to speak, and Orc didn’t think she ever knew she was doing it. There was something really endearing about it. He cut her off. “Do—do you want something to drink?”

“What do you have?” She glanced around the house. Her eyes could dart so quickly. Everything about her had such reflex to it. She was nimble where he was ungainly. He realized he had a Four Loko in one hand that he had almost entirely forgotten about. “And don’t you ever turn on any lights?”

“It’s just me and Howard. Not really,” he said. “And we have, uh, beer. Some Four Lokos. Some other stuff. Mostly just booze stuff.” Even his voice sounded injured now. He was unsure whether the stone and gravel had reached his vocal chords, but Howard had commented that his voice sounded deeper. But then again, for an adolescent boy, that was nothing new. 

“I think I’m okay,” she said. A piece of hair was escaping her ponytail. 

“Come on into the kitchen anyway,” he said. “I was just sitting around.” He saw she was wearing Teva sandals and wondered where she had come from. Sam’s? Her steps behind his were tentative, and since the coyotes and Bette and everything he had started to bump his arms on the walls of the hallway. He had quite literally gotten bigger, but he wondered if he had maybe always been that ungainly and just only noticed it now, when it felt like punishment. 

Astrid surveyed the kitchen. There was a long-abandoned bong on the counter, flanked by red plastic Solo cups, a pack of Takis, and an uneaten rotisserie chicken. A baseball cap that didn’t fit on Orc’s head anymore hung on the back of one of the chairs. And then the Four Loko pack, in the middle of the table, where Orc had been making a dent in it. Orc was not one to feel shame or embarrassment, not anymore, but Astrid had a way of making anyone feel embarrassed. She sat down in one of the chairs and crossed her legs.

“So what’s going on?” Orc asked. 

Astrid sighed and steepled her fingers on top of the table. “Everyone is really rattled by everything recently. I just wanted to check on you, I figure. Are you going to sit down?”

He looked down at his feet. “I—Yeah. Yeah.” He crept over to the table and sat at the chair facing her. 

She had a look of seriousness on her features. “I just wanted to get some information from you about what happened. You know. After—”

“After I got my face ripped off,” Orc said. 

“That’s not really how I would have put it.”

“I mean, what were you gonna say? After I was, I don’t know, mauled?” He threw a kind of faux-intellectual emphasis on the word mauled. 

She snorted and fished around in a messenger bag that she had over her shoulder, producing a notebook. “I just wanted to ask you some questions.”

“Okay,” he said again.

“How much of your body was affected by the mutation?” 

“Most of it,” Orc said. “But like, mostly up here.” He made a circular motion with his hand across his chest and upper arm. He stared down at the metallic top of the Four Loko can. 

“Are you still in pain?”

Orc almost laughed. “I dunno.” 

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t hurt. But it’s kinda hard to tell.” 

Astrid frowned. “Orc, if I can be frank, I—I’ve just been really upset by what happened to you. I remember when we used to work on math together. On geometry. I just kept thinking back to that.” 

“Long time ago,” Orc said.

“Yeah, but, I just wanted to make sure you know that I never thought you were a bad person, or wanted to hurt others. What happened with Bette was an accident. And I’m here just because I want to make sure you don’t get anymore hurt and we understand what happened to you.”

“My skin’s just rocks,” he said, and laughed without really knowing why. “That’s all that’s going on.”

“If there’s some kind of science behind it, or some way to bring your skin back—I mean, you’re alive, that’s enough.”

“Enough,” Orc repeated. The air suddenly seemed heavier, and there was the indication of a moment where Astrid didn't seem to know what to say. Enough. It felt more like this was how things were always meant to be: That there could be no relief from suffering, and that to be alive was to be in pain and to live with what you had done. “I know what everyone thinks about me and Howard,” Orc said. “That we’re kids so we shouldn’t be drinking or whatever, and Howard’s a thug. But it don’t really matter anymore. And it’s not like drinking does shit to me anyways at this point.” 

“I was never really a kid,” Astrid said. “Not that it matters.”

“What?” There was some bitterness in her voice that was unfamiliar to him. 

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just some of that pseudo-intellectual therapy talk. I don't think that’s anything you want to hear.”

Orc finished his Four Loko with a swig and looked down at the pack. Only two cans left. “Do you want some?” He said, gesturing down.

“That’s ok, Orc, really.” But her face was so tight and upset, and it made a deep pang in Orc that he couldn’t offer her anything more than alcohol. “I can understand why you’re drinking. After everything. But I really wish you wouldn't so much. It’s not good for the liver or the brain.”

Orc shrugged. “Not a big deal anymore.”

“Can I have a sip, actually? Just a sip.” She straightened her shoulders.

“Okay. A sip.” He slid the last can in front of her. 

She took a sip of Four Loko. “Pete always needed to be a kid more than I did, and so I was always just, you know, a—little adult. So to speak. Even before Pete was born. It was like I knew something was going to come along that would make me have to grow up. I don’t believe in fate. But I think I was always that kind of person. Good at being relied on.” Orc just stared. “You know, I read this book, Drama of the Gifted Child, where the main theory is that all parenting is abusive because of the power dynamics between parents and children. Interesting read. But it really tapped into the way I feel sometimes, where you just feel so cold and betrayed. And the only person I’m saying this to is someone I tutored who probably thinks I’m—”

“Thinks you’re what?”

“That I’m some kind of super-smart genius queen.” She took another drink. 

“I think you’re smart but don’t think that about you,” he said. “I think you’re a person.”

“Sometimes I just feel so far away from myself,” she said. She was doing that Astrid thing where she threw around long words and meandering sentences, as if showing off was her way of putting out that longing to be understood that painfully expressed itself in the tightness on her face. Her face reminded him of the statues in the church he sang in so long ago. They were very beautiful but always seemed unmoving and trapped inside of themselves 

“That’s how it feels,” Orc said.

“What?”

“When you was saying like, if it hurt. That’s how it feels. Far away.”

She was quiet.

“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said, finally. “You were always good at math even if you didn’t know it.”

“You don’t gotta be sorry to me,” he said.

She took another drink and said nothing for a long time. Then she placed her hands on the remnants of his cheekbones, her thumb spread across the corner of skin left on his chin. Her hands stayed there at first, simply her palms on his cheeks and her fingers running down along his face. Orc didn’t know what she was doing. Then kissed him with a gentle ease, as if she were breathing into his mouth. Orc had wanted to imagine kissing as a ravenous thing, more like eating French fries than taking the eucharist. Something you had to do all at once because you couldn’t be able to stop. And he felt something in the crannies of his body that he didn’t like, a kind of tick that as soon as Astrid put his mouth on his he wanted to rip out her hair or twist her arm away in his big hands. Simply because he could, she was close enough to him to let him, and there were few people who had occupied that position. He placed his hand on the back of her neck and laid his fingers completely still. 

Orc’s feelings for Howard were iceberg-like; They ran deep beneath the surface to an unfathomable place, but they were hard and cold. Astrid was warm. Astrid made humans out of cold things. And that was what Astrid made him feel, a sort of melting. A melting that left him sloppy and wasted and unable to say anything, even in the face of the deepest happiness, even in the face of the kind of thing someone else might have interpreted as normalcy, kindness, or whatever it meant to call an emotion love. He pulled away, his face hot. 

“I’m sorry,” Astrid said. Her eyes were downcast and her face was flushed. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t think there is anything to say. I just—”

Orc stood there, paralyzed. If it had been some other day or time or life maybe he would have kissed her again. Warmth was traveling through his body. He had never been kissed before now. He had never thought that fear and confusion could be so warm. 

“I have to go,” Astrid said, standing up from the table. She left her notepad on it, its paper spotless white and unwritten on. “Orc, I promise that everything is going to be all right.” He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, but she was too far away for him to touch her. She walked out the door as the suggestion of white in the nighttime.


End file.
